Nothing happens in your business until people click on your job ads.

Think about it this way. There’s one repeated cycle that runs in your business to bring revenue, and it looks something like this:

1. Applicants see your job postings and apply.

2. You narrow down applicants and hire them

3. Your caregivers go through training, orientation, and onboarding.

4. They then begin doing client visits.

5. Your clients pay your business, providing the money that keeps the business going.

6. You use the money to scale the number of clients you can serve by paying your caregivers, bringing on staff, and expanding your marketing. 

7. Over time, some of your caregivers leave, causing you to need to replace them.

8. The cycle starts over again.

Viewing all these steps as one interconnected process should make one thing clear: 

Job postings may seem like a small irritant in the grand scheme of running your agency, but if they don’t work properly they have the power to completely roadblock the much larger, more “important” aspects of your business. 

So, what can you do to maximize the effectiveness of your job postings?

Here are four places you can start.

#1: Use secret-shopping to optimize your headlines.

Ask a friend or family member who doesn’t know the name of your business [and ideally fits the demographics for the type of person you typically hire as a caregiver] to search Indeed or other job sites for caregiver jobs in your area. See which jobs they select. Ask them what caught their eye about those postings, then incorporate these elements into your own postings.

Use these experiments and metrics like Indeed’s clickthrough rate to keep changing your headlines until you find ones that catch people’s attention. 

You should also have someone secret-shop your agency’s entire application process to make sure there are no kinks in the process. 

(I did this for Careswitch’s request-a-demo process and found a major technical glitch that we then sorted out—but had no idea of for months.)

#2: Include the wage and shift details in the headline if possible. 

In today’s day and age you’re going to miss out on a substantial percentage of applicants who won’t even give you the time of day if they can’t find a few of these concrete details immediately.

How much to pay is a different question entirely, and often one of the most challenging questions about running a home care agency. I generally advise agencies to aim to pay in about the 75th percentile of their local market—in other words, higher than three-fourths of comparable businesses. 

#3: Err on the side of keeping your postings short. 

Let’s face it: who reads an entire job posting?

Better to write a few well-chosen words that they’ll read than a series of paragraphs that they’ll skim.

Also: look up your postings on job sites after you post them to make sure they’re rendering correctly. Sometimes, especially on Google, job posting text gets smushed together as long messy paragraphs that no one in their right mind will read.

#4: Tell the applicant what’s in it for them. 

These days, applicants have the power. Applicants aren’t selling themselves to you anymore so much as you’re selling your business to them. 

It may be uncomfortable, but it’s the reality. 

As such, you need to ensure that when a caregiver reads your job postings, they immediately find honest, compelling reasons to work with your agency.

I recently wrote a sample caregiver job ad that you’re welcome to steal; you can find it here. I wrote it with this principle in mind; part of it reads:

“As you know if you’ve already worked as a caregiver, caregiving can be a demanding job that requires compassion, patience, and sometimes the willingness to work nights or weekends. However, it’s one of the most important jobs in society, and here at our agency we treat our caregivers accordingly. We take care of our caregivers the way we want them to take care of our clients.

If you work with us,we’ll make sure you have fair pay, all the training you need, a supervisor who will always have your back, and the best schedule/hours we can.”

(If you’re interested, I also made sample job ad templates for a marketer, scheduler, and Director of Operations

—all of which you’re welcome to steal for your own use.)

Act Like You’re In A Race, Because You Are

In 2016, home care experts began declaring a caregiver recruitment crisis. In 2018, they started saying that the crisis had intensified. In 2020, the pandemic and its economic effects took the crisis to another level entirely.

There aren’t enough caregivers to go around. It’s a societal problem, and until we solve it, home care agencies will be competing with the likes of Amazon, Walmart, and Uber for employees. 

One of the best things you can do is create a rapid hiring process.

Figure out what you need to do to be contacting applicants within 24 hours at most or within 30-60 minutes where possible. Caregivers in search of a new job often choose to work wherever they can get work the soonest. 

All this said, it’s not all doom and gloom. It’s very possible to launch a home care business and achieve $1M+ in revenue within a few years, all while improving the lives of their clients and providing economic opportunity for their employees. 

For more resources on growing your business, check out The Frequently Asked Questions of Home Care, where we’ve brought together home care experts of all kinds to give quick, meaty answers to all the burning questions every home care owner asks at some point.

Connor Kunz is VP of Growth at Careswitch, the first free home care agency management software which you should totally go check out and start using. Before working at Careswitch, Connor led marketing and agency education at Home Care Pulse, including founding the Home Care Growth Summit and being the project lead for the annual Home Care Benchmarking Study. When he’s not working, Connor enjoys hiking with his wife, eating shredded cheese out of the bag, and watching TV while his gremlin-like cats judge him from across the room.